This paper addresses the direct (noniterative) solution of the method-of-moments (MoM) linear system, accelerated through block-wise compression of the MoM impedance matrix. Efficient matrix block compression is achieved using the adaptive cross-approximation (ACA) algorithm and the truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) postcompression. Subsequently, a matrix decomposition is applied that preserves the compression and allows for fast solution by backsubstitution. Although not as fast as some iterative methods for very large problems, accelerated direct solution has several desirable features, including: few problem-dependent parameters; fixed time solution avoiding convergence problems; and high efficiency for multiple excitation problems [e.g., monostatic radar cross section (RCS)]. Emphasis in this paper is on the multiscale compressed block decomposition (MS-CBD) algorithm, introduced by Heldring , which is numerically compared to alternative fast direct methods. A new concise proof is given for theN2computational complexity of the MS-CBD. Some numerical results are presented, in particular, a monostatic RCS computation involving 1 043 577 unknowns and 1000 incident field directions, and an application of the MS-CBD to the volume integral equation (VIE) for inhomogeneous dielectrics.